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Plans for Phil Lord & Chris Miller's Big Lego Movie Uncovered

Early last week it was announced that Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller would be writing and directing Warner Bros' Lego movie. I'm excited by this news because Lord and Miller are two incredibly creative individuals and I knew they had a unique take on a Lego movie that would be pretty cool to see. Well, that definitely seems to be the case, as Collider spoke with Phil Lord and got the lowdown on what they're planning for it. Essentially, they're making a "super large scale brick film," like one of those YouTube Lego movies but on a feature scale using hyper stop-motion. Sounds pretty awesome, no?

It was reported originally that Lord and Miller created a proposal that won over both the Warner Bros execs and the Lego execs. Lord explains: "Basically we came up with a treatment that was about a 40-page crazy treatment with a lot of images and stuff and that got everybody excited and then we were off to the races trying to make a deal for the last four months." But what made their presentation so unique? What will their Lego movie look like? Well, he doesn't explain the complete concept in full, but this is what Lord reveals:

"We always sparked to the idea that you could make a super large scale brick film. Have you seen those brick films online? There's a zillion of them. People literally make them in their basements with little Lego mini-figs and they build elaborate sets and they range from being like the most low production value to some of them people have spent years on and they look beautiful and they're really intricately detailed.

And we kept thinking, gosh there's got to be a way to take… if somebody wants to make a Lego movie they should make one of those on an enormous scale where you could actually build enormous, beautiful Lego sets and put a camera on the deck at mini-fig eye level and bring the kind of bravado that like the contemporary action-adventure film does, but do it on like this micro-scale. So we always sparked to that idea and it was just about trying to crack the character story to carry that."

Now that sounds pretty damn cool, but it doesn't top there. Lord explains that Lego wants "to make a super high quality product. They want to make something that not only appeals to young kids but also appeals to families and grown-ups and people like you and me who just like to go see movies." If you've seen Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, you certainly know these two are capable of developing a great film like that, plus this Lego concept just sounds totally awesome anyway. Lord continues:

"I don't know we're exactly are going to execute it but I would say the vast majority of the film takes place in an immersive all-Lego environment. So it's going to star mini-figs and we've created these really cool characters and a really nice character story between these mini-figs. And it's going to take place in a universe that's made entirely out of Lego to the point where if there's water or clouds or like a big explosion, that will be made out of animated Legos. And our goal was to make it look like a super charged stop-motion. Something like if Michael Bay kidnapped Henry Selick to make a movie for him."

Okay, I want to see this right now, that sounds incredible! It kind of reminds me of a mix of that Pixels viral video and the YouTube Lego movies, but on a massive scale. There can never be enough stop-motion movies anyway and I'd love to see them just go all-out creatively with this in every sense. Unfortunately, from the interview, it sounds like Lord and Miller are still gearing up to start shooting their R-rated 21 Jump Street for Sony first before they get to this Lego movie. So it will probably be a few years until we see this, but I'm really liking the concept so far and I can't wait to see what this looks like finished. Bring it on! Thoughts?